Motorola rocks on with iRadio
04-01-2006
by Ciaran Buckley

Motorola has announced an upgrade to its Rokr mobile phone, which can take advantage of its iRadio offering, a system that plays music of the listener's choice.

The US-based mobile phone maker unveiled the new Rokr and the iRadio service at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. For USD7 per month, iRadio subscribers will be able to select from any of 435 ad-free internet channels and download them from a computer onto their mobile phone.

The channels range from music genres -- like rock or jazz -- to specialised offerings like a station devoted to U2 or the Rolling Stones. An iRadio customer can listen to tunes directly from the phone, or can run it through their car stereo systems using a Bluetooth wireless network.

"The idea of using a portable device to stream music is a sound idea and will have a large market when the performance and price get to the right point," said Andrew Sheehy, research director at market research firm Generator Solutions, speaking to ElectricNews.Net. "People will pay for premium services that allow you to listen to precisely what you want to listen to, without any ads."

The new Rokr E2 has a Linux operating system that will support a number of music formats, including Apple Computer's iTunes. The Rokr E2 will hold up to about 500 songs, 400 more than the E1. The E2 is also fitted with removable memory cards with up to two gigabytes of external memory. It comes with a USB cable, which will allow for five second downloads, compared to two minutes for the E1.

"The Roker E1 was a very average multimedia phone with a mediocre music player in it," said Sheehy. "The new phone is a step in the right direction."

According to Generator Solutions, Europeans will be spending USD640 million by 2010 downloading full-track songs to their mobile phones. Another USD1.2 billion will be spent downloading musical ringtones, bringing the total mobile music spend to USD1.8 billion by the end of the decade, approximately 15 percent of the total market.

The report forecast that by 2010 online music will account for 25 percent of the music market and that CDs and other optical formats will have a residual 60 percent of the market.

Currently the mobile music, online music and mobile ringtone market accounts form only 4.4 percent of the overall music market.